PallasAbraham Lincoln's Indiana Boyhood 7th grade · age 12
By Simit Patel · published October 20, 2026
Abraham's father expected him to spend his days swinging an axe and working the farm, yet Abraham stayed up reading borrowed books by firelight. Was Abraham right to put his reading ahead of what his father wanted from him?
Under what conditions is obedience or disobedience to authority justified?
The Judgment Lab asks: What do we think about that? When we work on the Judgment Lab, our ultimate goal is to articulate our own principles and values in a thoughtful and respectful way.
As you know from the reading, Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to the Indiana wilderness in 1816. Life there was extremely hard. The family started out in a three-sided lean-to open to the cold, survived on hunting and fishing, and only later built a real log cabin with a dirt floor. Thomas needed Abraham's help to keep the farm going. When Abraham's mother died of milk sickness in 1818, things got even tougher: Abraham was not yet ten, and he and his sister had to help hold the household together on their own.
After Thomas remarried, Abraham's new stepmother brought stability to the cabin and encouraged his love of learning. Abraham had less than a year of formal schooling in total, but he read every book he could get his hands on — the Bible, Aesop's Fables, a life of George Washington, and more. His stepmother supported him, but others thought all that reading was a waste of time.
This Judgment Lab asks you to think about the tension between what Thomas expected from Abraham and what Abraham chose to do with his time. Thomas was a frontier farmer who counted on his son's labor to survive in the wilderness. Abraham, meanwhile, kept staying up late to read borrowed books instead of resting for the next day's work. Was Abraham right to put his reading ahead of what his father wanted from him?
The Judgment Lab asks under what conditions obedience or disobedience to authority is justified. Authority means the power someone has over you because of their role — a parent, a teacher, or a government leader, for example. Obedience means doing what that person tells you to do; disobedience means choosing not to. Something is justified when there is a good enough reason to defend it. In the reading, Thomas Lincoln held authority over Abraham as his father, and Abraham's late-night reading was a small but real act of disobedience: he was using time and energy his father expected him to spend on farm survival.
So was Abraham right to stay up reading by firelight when his father needed him rested and ready to work the farm, or should he have put down the books and done what Thomas expected?
Follow the steps below to complete this Judgment Lab. By the end of the lab, you will have decided whether you think Abraham was right to put his reading ahead of what his father wanted from him. You will also articulate and test your principles about under what conditions obedience or disobedience to authority is justified.
Step one
Generating claims
Abraham's father expected him to spend his days swinging an axe and working the farm, yet Abraham stayed up reading borrowed books by firelight. Was Abraham right to put his reading ahead of what his father wanted from him?
Yes
No
Step two
Articulating principles and values
Under what conditions is obedience or disobedience to authority justified?
Always, never, or sometimes?
Principles
I think that obedience or disobedience to authority is justified when...
Values and beliefs
I think that because I believe that...
Step three
Testing principles on a new case
Frederick Douglass Learns to Read
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, about the same time Abraham Lincoln was reading by firelight in Indiana. When Frederick was around eight years old, he was sent to Baltimore to live in the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet, and Frederick learned quickly. But when Hugh Auld found out, he ordered her to stop at once. He said that teaching a slave to read would make him unfit to be a slave forever, and that it would make him unhappy and give him ideas about freedom.
Frederick later wrote that this command taught him exactly what he needed to know: reading was the pathway from slavery to freedom. So he disobeyed. He traded bread with poor White boys in the neighborhood in exchange for reading lessons. He studied scraps of newspaper he found in the street and copied letters he saw chalked on shipyard timbers. At about age twelve, he got a hold of a book of famous speeches called The Columbian Orator and read arguments against slavery for the first time.
In 1838, when he was about twenty, Frederick Douglass escaped to the North. Because he could read and write, he became one of the most powerful speakers and newspaper editors in America, publishing his own life story in 1845 and arguing for the end of slavery for the rest of his life. The master who forbade him to read had no legal duty to him at all. Under Maryland law, Frederick was property, and teaching him was discouraged.
Apply your principle to the new case
According to your general principle, was Frederick Douglass right to disobey Hugh Auld's order and secretly teach himself to read? Why or why not?
From Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Boyhood, a 7th grade history lesson on Pallas.